Twelve Tips to Improve Your SMS Marketing Campaigns

At Textlocal, we are dedicated to helping you get the most from your SMS marketing activity. We understand the importance of achieving your goals and can advise on the best practices to maximize the potential of your mobile marketing campaigns, in addition to providing a comprehensive marketing toolkit on Textlocal platform.

We help businesses use mobile marketing effectively, whether it is to build prospective customer database, to generate leads with effective campaigns, to convert them with special offers or to retain existing customers through loyalty points and timely feedback process.

The results you achieve are often based on what you learn from previous campaigns and big data. And that’s why we recommend you to conduct campaigns that can be easily tracked and give you granular analytics. It is imperative that you use this data to make key decisions, gain valuable insights into customer behavior and campaign effectiveness and continuously optimize your mobile marketing campaigns to achieve the best results. Take a look below at our top tips to increase the performance of your next mobile marketing campaign…

1. Include a clear call to action

Ensure that the reason for the SMS is made clear. You want the recipient to act on your SMS, so tell them what they need to do to benefit from the information they have been sent.

2. Track your campaigns and optimize

Make sure you measure how effective your SMS marketing campaign has been so you can improve it further next time. How many responses did you get? What was your return on investment? Try texting different offers, at various times of the day, days of the week, or target different groups of customers, to find which works best for you. Textlocal provides granular click through metrics for webpages, files, and coupons attached with your SMS campaigns.

3. Be prepared and know when your customers respond

Pick the right time to send SMS campaigns to your customers. If you want to generate an action or response then make sure you leave your customers enough time during the day to do so. You can also use Textlocal scheduler to draft your messages now and schedule them for delivery at any time you choose.

4. Be concise and keep it short

A single SMS message consists of 160 characters. For the most cost-effective campaign you need to choose your words carefully. Get to the point straight away, the benefit or reward to the recipient should be clear.

5. Find the right frequency

Should you send your SMS campaigns daily, weekly or monthly? If you send messages too frequently, customers might get annoyed and unsubscribe from the service. However if you leave it too long between messages, the customer may lose interest and will have forgotten why they subscribed in the first place.

There’s no fixed amount of messages you should be sending per week or month – the frequency needs to be fine-tuned based on your audience and the purpose of your messages.

6. Create a sense of urgency

Set an expiry date to your discount coupons and vouchers. Limited time validity creates a sense of urgency for your customers and results in higher conversion rates. Textlocal platform provides an easy way for you to create, send and redeem mobile vouchers!

7. Don’t overdo it – less is more

Make sure you manage your contact groups properly, and avoid repeatedly sending the same SMS marketing message to recipients. Keep your communication fresh and engaging.

8. Keep your database clean

It can be costly to continue sending messages to old numbers. Be sure to regularly check and delete the numbers that can’t be reached to save time and money. Three strikes and you’re out is a good principle.

9. Use keywords to help grow your data

Use an SMS keyword (e.g. text OFFERS to 56263XXX to receive discount coupons from your local shopping mall) to grow an opt-in list of customers that choose to receive your SMS alerts. Print this everywhere and you will easily grow an opt-in list of followers. SMS marketing can be intrusive if sent to somebody who hasn’t given their permission. Protect the reputation of your organisation by ensuring all recipients have allowed you to communicate with them.

10. Respect the opt-out mechanism

Include a simple opt-out option regularly in your texts. Always ensure you make it clear to your customers that they can stop receiving messages from you at any time.

11. Know your audience

Make sure that the recipient is going to be interested in what you have to offer. It’s likely that each offer or message will need to be tailored to individual customer groups. Age, gender, location and past purchases should all be taken into account when you send out your messages. For example you wouldn’t offer free lipstick to men, because it’s likely the response rate would be next to zero and some of your customers may choose to unsubscribe as a result.

Paying attention to a customer’s purchase history and collecting her demographic data will help target effectively.

12. Personalise your texts for a better experience

Use our mail merge feature and insert names, appointment times or other customer-specific details into your messages for that personalized message. You can also brand your text by setting the Sender Name on the SMS message as your company name for maximum impact.

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It's been our pleasure that we are connected with TextLocal for the services since long & we are happy to utilize these services, Recently we were looking to send personalized messages because the content of the message was with a link on candidates name and asking some sort of personal information. We approached Textlocal and were told about the "Excel to SMS" feature. We have sent personalized campaigns to 3 lakh+ data and are very happy with the results, all thanks to Textlocal team.

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Their API service works perfectly. Their customer support picks up the phone and responds to our queries within less than 5 minutes *every single time* and the user interface of the product is simple and once again, just works.

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Our experience with Textlocal's E-mail to SMS Gateway service has been very positive - all the way from evaluating the service (received very nice technical sales support to address our key requirements) to adoption (very simple & quick processes + very responsive team that helped us get started quickly) & usage- the service itself has been very reliable so far!!

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Easy to use and the SMS campaigns are done swiftly. Batch Scheduling on a specific time has been functioning superbly. Tracking of messages provide a great support to us in analyzing the outcomes.Overall a great experience !

Deepika Radhu